Can you say Claustrophobia?

As we’re down to the final strokes with the bathroom, it is time to start putting things back together. One of the things that needed to be done was getting the mechanical fan timer replaced with an electronic one.

The electrician was here on Friday to do that. Much cleaner looking and no more ratcheting noise turning it on.

To complete the installation, I checked to make sure that the fan was still behaving as expected but although it was running, there was almost no air being drawn through it. So I popped my head up into the attic space to see if I could figure out what was going on.

There was the duct from the fan, not attached to anything! Now there are two problems:

The duct was not attached to the exhaust vent to the outside.

No air was getting through anyway, likely due to a kink in the duct itself.

So, no alternative but to crawl into the attic about 5 or 6 feet to see if I could figure out what was going on and reconnect the duct. Now while this doesn’t sound like that big a deal, it is when you consider it is the middle of summer heat and there is not much space to work in… and I mean really not much space – only 11 inches at most.

So I put on my coveralls (it is amazingly dirty in the attic of a 130 year old house though the pictures don’t show it) and wriggled my way on my stomach up to the vent area. After only about 15 minutes of fiddling to un-kink the duct and get it re-clamped on the external vent, I was able to work my way back out again. Funny, it was much harder getting out of the space than getting in – go figure.

But the fan was reconnected and now drawing air so all is good. Hopefully I don’t need to climb up there again any time soon!

People interested in seeing the full renovation process as tracked in this blog should start here.